Steinberg SpectraLayers Pro 13.0.20 — macOS

When a mix has a hum, a click, or a bleed that standard EQ can't touch, you need to see the problem. Steinberg SpectraLayers Pro turns audio into a 3D visual display so you can paint, cut, or lift sound the way you'd edit a photograph.

Repairs clicks, pops, and background noise without damaging the track

• Repairing clicks, pops, and background noise without damaging the rest of the track.
• Separating a mix into stems using AI-based unmixing — works with full mixes as if they were individual tracks.
• Isolating vocals with the Voice Denoiser.

Works with Cubase and Nuendo via ARA 2 on macOS 12 or later

• It integrates with Cubase and Nuendo via ARA 2 for a streamlined workflow.
• Runs on macOS 12 or later, Intel and Apple Silicon.
• Interface is in English.

A real-world scenario: cleaning location audio for a short film

A post-production sound editor I know works on short films shot on location. The dialog track from a café scene had a low-frequency HVAC rumble that was nearly constant, plus a few hard clicks from a bumped table microphone. Standard EQ took out some of the rumble but dulled the voices. With SpectraLayers Pro, he loaded the stereo dialog file, switched to the spectral view, and located the hum visually — it showed as a continuous horizontal band. He selected that band with the lasso tool and attenuated it without touching the speech frequencies above it. The clicks were even simpler: they appeared as narrow vertical spikes in the spectrum. He isolated each one, removed them, and the resulting dialog sounded clean and natural. The Voice Denoiser handled the background chatter from a distant table in a separate pass. What would have taken an hour of careful automation in a DAW took about fifteen minutes here.

Runs on Intel and Apple Silicon Macs from a standard disk image installer

SpectraLayers Pro 13.0.20 runs on macOS 12 and later, and it supports both Intel and Apple Silicon Macs. The installer is a standard disk image — you open it and run the setup. No special configuration is required. The interface stays in English, and all the spectral tools, AI unmixing engines, and the 3D visualization display work identically on either architecture. If you are using a system with limited storage, keep in mind that spectral editing sessions can produce large temporary files when working with long recordings or multitrack stems.

Opens directly from Cubase or Nuendo for seamless spectral editing

The ARA 2 integration with Cubase and Nuendo is the cleanest bridge. You can open SpectraLayers from inside those DAWs, edit in the spectral domain, and have the changes appear back in the DAW timeline without bouncing or exporting. If you use a different DAW — Logic Pro, Ableton Live, or Reaper — you can still work in SpectraLayers Pro as a standalone application and export the cleaned audio as a standard WAV or AIF file to bring back into your session. On the macOS side, the application respects the system audio preferences for output and input, so it plays well with aggregate devices or audio interfaces set up in the Sound panel. The drag-and-drop support from Finder works fine; you can grab audio files directly from a folder or an external drive and drop them onto the SpectraLayers workspace.

A workflow for removing a sibilance problem on a voice track

Start by opening the vocal recording in SpectraLayers Pro. Play through the track and mark the sections where the sibilance — those harsh "s" and "sh" sounds — is most noticeable. Select one of the offending regions, then use the automatic de-essing tool to reduce the high-frequency energy. Listen back. If the automatic pass is too aggressive or not strong enough, switch to the manual de-esser and adjust the frequency range and reduction amount until the sibilance sounds natural. Apply the same setting to the other marked regions. When you are satisfied, export the cleaned vocal track as a 24-bit WAV file. Import that file back into your DAW session, lining it up with the original. The whole process usually takes a few minutes once you have identified the problem spots, and it avoids the phase issues that can come from heavy EQ-based de-essing in a traditional mixer.

• Installer release notes are available for version 13.0.20.

• macOS 12 or later
• Intel or Apple Silicon